Tomlinson uses words like colours. Patterns of sounds either suggest themselves to him, or else he lays them on his verbal canvases with such professional ease that they seem to have grown there. His flowing, descriptive poems are uniquely delightful, leading from surface to surface in such a way as to suggest depths, or in some cases, to a dissolution of the surface altogether into pure sensation. Because the world Tomlinson observes is so accurately transformed into poetry, the world he imagines, in poems on Marat and Charlotte Corday [in The Shaft], comes as something of a surprise. The historical poems in The Shaft are less visual than Tomlinson's nature poems, and they suffer, slightly, from some heavy philosophising…. Poems like 'Casarola' and 'The Shaft', which slip an idea into an exquisitely embroidered texture of description, are perhaps the finest poems in this fine collection. (pp. 62-3)

Anne...